A liquid crystal display panel is prepared by assembling and aligning, under vacuum, an array substrate on which liquid crystal has been dropped and a color filter substrate coated with an adhesive (which is also referred to as sealant). FIG. 1 shows the schematic view of the construction of a typical liquid crystal display panel, which comprises a pixel area 1, an alignment layer 2, a sealant 3, a color filter black matrix 4 and a glass substrate 5. Currently, there are a variety of sealants commercially available in the markets. The main ingredients of the sealants include ultraviolet (UV) polymerizable monomers, heat-polymerizable epoxy monomers, epoxy acrylate resins, photoinitiators, heat curing agents, coupling agents, organic fillers, inorganic fillers, particulate additives, etc.
Conventional sealants are crosslinked stepwise by UV polymerization and heat polymerization. Before polymerization, the majority of the components of the sealants are comprised of small molecules. As shown in FIG. 2, during the alignment of a color filter substrate and an array substrate, the liquid crystal 3 disposed between two glass substrates 1 tends to exert impact on sealant 2, such that undesirable phenomenon like penetration occurs. The current attempts to solve this problem focus on improving of the properties of sealant materials.
The Chinese patent publication No. CN102643432A discloses a cholesteric siloxane side-chain liquid crystal polymer, which has the properties including a reversible cholesteric phase, a relatively wide range of liquid-crystal-phase temperature, and a relatively high helical twisting power. The properties of this side-chain liquid crystal polymer can be adjusted by modifying the length of carbon chain in the spacer group, and the grafting molar ratio of the crosslinking agent to the liquid crystal monomer. However, there is no report of application of such a polymer in display art or other fields up to now.